Kittens and Dragons
by KittyNoodlesPPC
Summary: Salandria has had a fascination with dragons since she lived at the orphanage. Lady Liadrin isn't entirely sure what to make of it. Birthday fic for the incredibly awesome wanda von dunayev, who writes a much better Liadrin than I do. Happy birthday (and get well soon)!


**Disclaimer: **I do not own Lady Liadrin. Or any of her cats. I also don't own any part of Quel'thalas, Silvermoon City, or the Sunfury Spire. I don't own the adorable little orphan Salandria, whom Liadrin has decided to adopt, because I cannot handle that much cuteness in my life (and if what happens in Time to Visit the Caverns is any indication of her future, I'm not sure I could handle the heartache, either.) Basically everything in this fanfic belongs to Blizzard Entertainment. I only own the fanfic itself.

Oh, and the names I gave the kitties. But those are free-to-use because they are names.

**Warnings: **Contains spoilers for the Horde version of the quest 'Time to Visit the Caverns'. Also contains one incredibly unlucky kitten. And if you don't view Salandria as an adorable little seven-year-old (or whatever the blood elf equivalent is to a human seven-year-old)... well, I do. So nyah.

* * *

"Lady Liadrin?"

A chubby little hand tugged urgently at the sleeping Matriarch's sleeve, nearly dragging it off her shoulder before she finally stirred and sat up, wincing as her back ached in protest. How long had she been asleep? She vaguely remembered sitting down to work on some of the paperwork her position often required her to deal with, and she felt certain the sun had only still been rising (why, she often wondered, did she bother waking up so early just to deal with a few measly documents that could easily wait another _week_?)

There was another tug on her sleeve, and the drowsy redhead looked down to see little Salandria standing next to her chair, her bottom lip quivering slightly as she held out an equally small black-and-white kitten – the perpetually unlucky Whiskers – whose tail appeared to have been broken near the tip.

"Whiskers hurt his tail again," Salandria explained. She blinked several times, but couldn't quite hide the tears that kept trying to build up in her wide little eyes as she asked, "Can you help him?"

Whiskers mewled pitifully and stared up at Liadrin with big, watery, yellow eyes, then reached out to bat helplessly at a strand of hair that had come loose from Liadrin's ponytail. With a sigh, Liadrin carefully took him from the little girl and settled him in her lap.

"What happened to you this time?" Liadrin cooed as she took a closer look at Whiskers's tail. It was definitely broken; the Matriarch wondered furtively if it had gotten caught in one of the dresser drawers again as she carefully cupped her hands around the injured extremity and channeled the Light through it until she sensed the fractures fade and disappear.

"There," Liadrin said with a smile, "good as new."

Whiskers turned, pawed carefully at his tail as if to make sure it was really fixed, then leapt from Liadrin's lap into Salandria's waiting arms – a perfectly choreographed exchange they had only had occasion to practice due to the number of tweaked tails, sprained paws and scorched ear tips Liadrin had had to tend to in the last few weeks.

"We were playing adventurers," Salandria was explaining as she let Whiskers down onto the floor. Liadrin watched the little hairball out of the corner of her eye as her adoptive daughter continued, "Whiskers and I were running around my room, pretending it was a jungle. And we jumped off this big boulder – it was really just the bed," she explained when Liadrin blinked at the idea of a boulder in _any _blood elf's room, "– except Whiskers landed first, and he didn't move out of the way fast enough..."

"...And you landed on his tail by accident." Three weeks ago, when she and Salandria had first returned to Silvermoon, Liadrin might have been surprised that Salandria could be so careless around the animal she had all but begged Liadrin to allow her to keep (along with the other fifty or so cats that now infested both hers and Salandria's rooms – all Salandria's, save for two). After hearing a novel's worth of similar explanations for why Whiskers seemed to need medical attention on an hourly basis, Liadrin could no longer help but be amused rather than dismayed at the little furball's misadventures.

It wasn't so much that Salandria (or anyone else wise enough to leave well enough alone) was too rough with the kitten; he just had the extreme misfortune of being the most likely animal in all of Silvermoon to find or actively get into trouble, and this usually meant anything between tweaking a paw as he tried to race down stairs that were still too large for him and just happening to walk by an open window of the Grand Magister's quarters while the man was having one of his object-tossing fits.

And quite frankly, Liadrin was glad this time the accident had been play-related. Salandria could be rather stubborn when it came to anyone else being responsible for Whiskers getting hurt, and the thirty minutes Liadrin had taken to convince her that no, Rommath had most certainly _not _been 'aiming' for the kitten when that stack of papers had gone flying out the open window and knocked the silly thing down into the garden below in a flurry of paper cuts and surprised yowling had been one of the longest half-hours the Matriarch had ever lived through.

A startled squeak jolted Liadrin from her musing, and she looked up just in time to see Whiskers disappear through the open door into the hallway in a tangle of limbs and... something green and distinctly plush in appearance.

"Salandria, I think your toy dragon is attacking Whiskers," Liadrin said, pointing to the door. "You might want to go rescue him before he manages to tumble down the stairs again."

"Or gets under somebody's feet, like yesterday!" Salandria giggled, and Liadrin couldn't help but grin at the memory herself. Halduron had been less than impressed with the hapless kitten, and he'd been even less pleased when Salandria had taken the time to laugh at him before scooping up Whiskers and fleeing the scene of the crime. It had been a bit difficult to keep a straight face when the Ranger General had told Liadrin about what had happened, and the Matriarch was fairly certain he had heard the helpless snicker she had _almost_ been able to smother before he'd gone out of earshot.

Salandria turned to leave, then paused for a moment, seeming lost in thought as she nibbled at her lower lip and stared at the doorway. Liadrin waited patiently, already able to recognize the gears turning in the girl's head and curious to hear what she would say next. After all, the last time Salandria had been so contemplative, she had ended up asking Liadrin a slew of questions about whether or not fitting Whiskers with a set of kitten-sized armor might help him avoid getting hurt quite so often (they had both decided that this was probably not the case, and Salandria seemed to have convinced herself that the armor would more than likely invite even worse trouble for the poor thing, but it had been an interesting conversation all the same.)

After a few seconds, Salandria turned back to Liadrin and asked, "Lady Liadrin, do you think Whiskers would get along well with a real dragon? Just a baby one?"

"I think the dragon would be careful not to hurt him, in any event," Liadrin answered slowly. "Although Whiskers might be a bit leery of it, at first. And once he got used to it, he'd probably cause trouble for the dragon, too!" she teased, reaching out to tap Salandria gently on the nose.

"Yeah, he'd probably get his tail set on fire or something!" Salandria giggled again, not seeming to understand how _un_funny such a thing would be if it really happened. Then again, considering the last three weeks, Liadrin wouldn't be surprised if the shock value of seeing Whiskers get himself hurt was beginning to wear off a bit for the little girl.

"We should be fortunate that there are no dragons in Silvermoon, then!" Liadrin commented. "Only toys that attack unlucky kittens in the hallway."

As if on cue, there was another squeak from the hallway, followed almost immediately by a man's startled grunt and the sound of someone stumbling and trying to regain their balance. With a sheepish grin at Liadrin, Salandria turned and bolted out the door, not even stopping to close the door behind her before she raced to Whiskers's rescue.

Liadrin sighed, listening for a moment to the sounds of Salandria apologizing to whoever the poor bastard was her kitten had tripped up before abandoning the paperwork entirely and wandering back into her bedroom, her mind no longer focused on the present.

Two fat tom cats – one ginger-colored with white paws, the other a solid dark brown – were asleep on opposite sides of the bed from each other as she entered. Fatty –the ginger cat – didn't so much as twitch as Liadrin crossed the room and sat down next to him one the mattress; by contrast, Cocoa immediately padded across the mattress and planted his big behind on Liadrin's lap before proceeding to clean his ears, all with the air of a feline who clearly believed he owned everything that came into the room except his fellow tom.

Content not to move for a while (and she wouldn't, if Cocoa had his way – which he always did), Liadrin leaned back, bracing herself with her hands as she stared up at the ceiling and let her mind wander.

Today was the fourth time Salandria had brought up the possibility of having a real dragon around – although it was the first time she'd mentioned it being a baby. And if what the elfling had told her at the end of Children's Week was the truth, it was the journey to the Caverns of Time and her run-in with two of the 'big dragon-men' – Liadrin could only assume she had been attempting to describe a pair of drakonids – that had kicked the fascination with owning a dragon into high-gear.

It wasn't necessarily the idea that Salandria thought dragons _could _be owned, much less tamed, that disturbed Liadrin so much; many children Salandria's age (and even some old enough to know better) entertained similarly ridiculous ideas about trolls, gnomes, and even tauren. What was so unsettling about Salandria's fascination was that she had on more than one occasion brought up all the ways one might go about _acquiring _a dragon – schemes that ranged from stealing an egg from its nest (which even Salandria called 'really, really stupid') to catching a hatchling while it was testing out its wings and keeping it tied in a big, open field. Added to this was Salandria's apparent refusal to see dragons as sentient, devastatingly powerful creatures rather than as speaking beasts of burden no one else was brave enough to tame.

More than once Liadrin had been tempted to tell Salandria that others _had _tried, and that the repercussions of such an act had been fittingly terrible. Just as many times, the Matriarch had held her tongue and steered Salandria away from the topic of dragons entirely; there was an ever-present fear that telling Salandria about the enslavement of the Red Dragonflight, even in piecemeal, would only encourage the girl to find a way to make her own schemes a reality.

Salandria had told her the dragon she had seen during Children's Week – Zaladormu – had prevented the two drakonids from harming her by saying she had 'done nothing, and was not to blame for what she might do in the future'. Liadrin wasn't sure how much or how little of the wild tale was true, but she fervently hoped this piece was nothing more than the girl's imagination. Because if it wasn't...

And that was the thought that made Salandria's fascination with dragons so frightening – was what made her wild plans and her failure to see them as anything other than large, scaly mounts so troubling. _What if?_

What if, while she was in the Caverns of Time, she really _had _beenattacked, seemingly without reason? What if... what if there _was _reason, and that reason was terrible enough that dragonkin would seek to harm her while she was still an innocent little girl? Could there be any way that she, Liadrin, could attempt to alter the course of whatever dark future would cause such ancient creatures to attack a child?

There was a peal of laughter from the hallway, punctuated by the sound of little feet pounding down the corridor and the equally delighted squeaks of a kitten at play. The sound startled Liadrin; it didn't fit with her dark imaginings at all. How could anyone who grew up playing with the world's most accident-prone kitten grow up to be a nuisance to dragons who sought to protect all of Azeroth, each in the manner of his or her own flight?

As Cocoa yawned and curled up in her lap, Liadrin was certain she knew the answer to that: _No one could._

It didn't matter that Salandria had an unusual fascination with keeping a dragon as a pet – after all, Liadrin herself had wanted a fox kit, then a murloc, and then a cobra for pets when she had been young. And it didn't matter what Salandria told her about her trip to the Caverns of Time; all children liked to fabricate their stories, and surely no dragonkin in its right mind would attack a child, no matter what the cause!

The Matriarch nodded, her lips straightening into a thin, stubborn line as Fatty sat up, stretched, and hopped down from the bed in search of his food bowl. She wasn't going to worry about this anymore. She was going to bring Salandria up to be a fearsome Blood Knight, loyal to Quel'thalas and lead along her every path by the Light. She was going to trust to time and maturity to teach Salandria the difference between an ox and a dragon charged with the keeping of Azeroth's timeways.

And as another round of giggles drifted to her ears, Liadrin swore she would never see the day when the name _Salandria _stirred dragonkin to violence. It was an impossibility.

She would make sure of that.

* * *

**Author's Note: **So hopefully I didn't write Liadrin too stupid/girly/fragile here (I'm not even going to apologize for having Rommath throw object-tossing fits, we all know he does). If I did, I humbly throw myself upon the mercy of wanda von dunayev.

On a more serious note, I kept the amount of angst to an unusual minimum (for me) for two very important reasons: First, I don't know very much about Liadrin's backstory save for the tidbits I've managed to glean from my short tour of duty in Shattrath. Second, this is a birthday present and I've never liked giving sad things as gifts – even unwittingly. It's one reason why I give gift cards instead of movies and books.

And Liadrin needs some fluffiness, darn it. That poor woman gets it rough even from fanartists! (Although apparently even I am not above making her deal with paperwork, fall asleep on her desk, and wake up with every muscle in her back wanting to kill her for her poor choice of bed. _Because all leaders have paperwork sometimes. _She probably just has a little less than, say, the freaking Regent Lord.)

...Im'ma stop rambling now.


End file.
